CHAPTER 44 Humanimal Dispossessions
In the opening sentences of Indra Sinha’s An i m a l’s Pe o p l e, the teenaged
protagonist Animal declares: “I used to be human once. So I’m told. I
don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I
walked on two feet just like a human being” (2007, 1). The novel is a thinly
veiled representation of the 1984 Bhopal disaster, broadly interpreted as
the world’s worst industrial disaster, in which the American- owned Union
Carbide corporation exposed over half a million people to methyl isocya-
nate, among other chemicals. It represents the disaster and its long after-
math, politicizing the power of transnational corporations and their dehu-
manizing effects. Animal, whose spine is twisted, has been formed into a
quadruped as a result of toxic exposure. The movement of Animal’s inau-
gural sentences presents us with a fascinating formulation of the human,
and of Animal’s particular relation to its figuration. He begins by signaling
that the human is not something that simply “is” but rather is something
contingent that can be moved toward and away from. In the second frag-
mentary sentence, Animal signals the human as a narrative creation: “So
I’m told.” The human from the very outset of the story is thus positioned
as provisional, as a product of narrative structure, and Animal distances
himself from his humanity through his insistence on the past tense of it.
More subtly, he complicates the narrative of his former humanity in his
own telling, posing this “human” past as one in which he walked on two
feet just like a human being. Even when he was a human, then, Animal’s sly
rhetoric signals that he was always only ever proximate to it.
In the previous chapter, I explored posthumanitarian fictions, in which
humanitarian actors face their complicity with the dehumanization of those
they wish to humanize. Here, I turn to figurations of the human as animal
in postcolonial literature. This is not as sharp a turn as might first appear.
The question of the animal emerges in the final section of the preceding